The concept of simulation of critical events to hone skills, in contrast to mere practice, has long been a staple of human training methodology. At its heart, the goal of simulation is to truly mimic the physical and psychological experience of an event, thus harnessing the power of emotional context and psychological stress to retain both physical and intellectual skills and lessons with more reliability than practice alone can yield.
Various industries have adopted and refined simulation-based training methodologies, attempting to replicate work environments as precisely and accurately as possible to prepare students and professionals for critical events that may be encountered in practice. In the aviation industry, for example, flight simulators have improved over time as computer technology has become more advanced and affordable. In the institution of medicine, medical scenario simulation has grown to become a standard component of medical training and continuing education, typically relying on physical “dummy” apparatuses to represent the “patients” or “subjects” of the simulation.
Simulation-based training systems that are both low cost and completely immersive are significantly limited or non-existent in many industries. Further, current simulation tools are not tightly integrated with computer systems that allow for simulation case scenarios to be authored for distribution and reuse, or stored and aggregated for analysis, scoring, and review. With regard to medicine specifically, the majority of simulation taking place in medical education today involves the use of full-scale, computer-driven manikins that are capable of portraying human physiology and around which a realistic clinical environment can be recreated. In this sense, manikin simulators are uniquely suited for training scenarios capable of satisfying the requirements for equipment fidelity, environment fidelity, and psychological fidelity, or the capacity to evoke emotions in trainees that they could expect to experience in actual practice. However, there remains a gap in the manikin's ability to represent a broad array of demographics or visually important clinical scenarios. In addition, there are significant logistical challenges associated with gathering work-hour limited trainees at sufficiently frequent intervals to foster maintenance of clinical competency using manikin simulation. Instructor salaries, technician salaries, and opportunity-costs involved in equipping and maintaining a state-of-the-art simulation facility employing such manikins represents a significant cost and places significant limitations on the ability of manikin simulation to integrate fully into existing curricula.
Beyond the training of novice medical staff, simulation-based training has also come to be recognized as integral to maintaining skills of fully licensed and practicing medical staff, but the logistical challenges of bringing staff together outside of regularly scheduled hours to a high fidelity environment or of bringing a high fidelity environment to the regular work location of the staff has presented an almost insurmountable challenge to simulation-based training in this population. The cost and lack of portability of the modern high fidelity medical simulation system also presents a barrier to its wider adoption outside of medical education institutions and outside of wealthy nations, despite the clear need for such maintenance training within community institutions and novice and maintenance training in developing countries. The limited ability of manikin based systems to represent different ethnicities, age groups, and visual symptoms, including rashes, also represents a degradation of psychological fidelity, with these aspects of medical simulation particularly relevant to training of experienced providers and in the field of tropical medicine.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.